Throughout the past decade, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) researchers have continued to track the growth of Agile practices, the rise of cross-functional DevOps collaborations, and the impact of Continuous Delivery on business and IT. In most modern organizations, these three areas are inextricably intertwined.

This paper presents EMA's latest findings on these topics from a research survey conducted during the spring of 2017. The intent of the survey was to highlight the current state of software delivery and related tooling in today's companies. This paper summarizes the results, tracing the DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices and tools most relevant to managing the delivery of business services in 2017.

Research on these topics is particularly critical at this point in time. EMA is actively tracking what has amounted to a revolution in business--and an accompanying revolution in software delivery--that has occurred over the past five years. Today's rapidly changing and fast-moving business climate is the prime mover for a vastly changed IT landscape. IT has evolved from being a cost center to a cost generator, as software has become the core around which modern businesses operate.

Massive changes in the way revenue is generated, combined with increasingly direct and customer-centric service delivery, have created an environment of "institutionalized change." To be successful, business must be able to implement new ideas very quickly, and IT organizations bear the brunt of the work necessary to make this happen. This ìneed for speedî has driven a revolution in software delivery. Agile practices enable software to be delivered more frequently, in smaller increments, and at a faster pace. Developments in technology have enabled a new generation of componentized, massively distributed applications running on technologies that are radically different from those of the past. Container-based microservices, orchestration engines, and the most powerful and sophisticated software deployment engines in history--modern Release Automation products--have all contributed to the rise of Continuous Delivery.

The cumulative result of these factors contributes to growing complexity and a pressing need to automate resource-intensive tasks. Yesterday's toolsets and support practices--in which tools relied heavily on human expertise and manual processes--are no longer viable. At the same time, designing, developing, deploying, and supporting complex modern application environments requires collaborative decision-making supported by a new level of cross-functional skills, knowledge, and judgment.

Surmounting these challenges to embrace the requirements of a new era requires changes to mindsets, skill sets, and tooling. This white paper encapsulates EMA's latest take on how this can best be done.